A Country Bumpkin in the Big City

My first visit to Spain’s capital was undertaken on the spur of the moment and upon the urgings of some of my fellow students – Finnish Pia, Norwegian Bettina (plus her cousin Joachim who joined us from Oslo) and Belgian Beike.

We travelled up through Andalucía, towards central Spain and Castilla La Mancha by bus, a journey which took just over five hours – with the only  stop for refreshment and lavatorial purposes being at a rather dingy bar and scantily stocked gift shop combo in Ciudad Real.

Although Madrid bus station is hardly the best of introductions to the capital city, we were not downhearted, and skipped merrily out in search of the nearest metro to whisk us into the city centre and hopefully also into reasonable proximity of our hostel.

My first impression of Madrid was its immensity in comparison with the tiny city we had just left.

Of course I was a country girl hailing from a country village – Population 50, so the fact that Granada’s 275,000 inhabitants made it quite an intimidating place was now patently ridiculous when faced with a city of 3.3 million people. Madrid is, in fact, the third most populated European city after London and Berlin.

Having dumped our rucksacks at the hostel – where we had been successful in persuading the manageress to allow us to take the economical step of squeezing four girls into a double room – we set off on a hunt for some food and, coincidently, my first really dire gastronomical experience in Spain.

Determined to try some of the local delicacies, my eye alit on the appetisingly named callos a la madrileña. Having been wonderfully surprised by pulpo a la gallega (a Galician recipe of boiled octopus sprinkled with olive oil and paprika), brema a la gaditana (a sea bream dish from Cádiz) and paella valenciana (no explanation required) I listened to the waiter’s description of it being a ‘meat’ based dish and sat back to wait for my taste bud temptation.

It was tripe.

Not as in poppycock, either. No, it was real tripe: nasty, slithery greyish-white bits of animal organ swimming grotesquely in a watery sauce. I tried, I really did; forcing the smallest pieces of that infernally chewy rubber-like matter into my mouth before using my horrified tongue to ease it into the back of my constricted throat to start its laborious journey down into the depths of my poor heaving stomach.

The waiter, who had been closely observing the look of anguish on my face, eventually leapt to my rescue. Perhaps callos weren’t to everybody’s taste, he reassured me; possibly a bowl of meaty soup would do the trick? I should have been warned by his previously misleading use of the term ‘meat’, but instead I just nodded, heartily relieved that my ordeal was over.

Which I immediately realised it wasn’t when the bowl of ‘soup’ was plonked in front of me; water with congealed bits of fat floating on its tepid surface that may once have held some sort of dead animal part, maybe even the tripe itself. It simply couldn’t be done, so with my unsympathetic companions desperately trying to stifle their snorts of mirth, I smiled sweetly at the waiter and told him that I thought I had some sort of stomach bug and would probably be better off with a hot mug of chamomile tea.

The next day saw us waiting eagerly at the door of our first, and at least by me, most anticipated museum: El Prado, originally commissioned in 1785 by Carlos III and opened in 1819 to house the royal collection. It features a wonderful selection of European art and sculpture from the 12^th to the early 19^th century.

Having already been bowled over by the Uffizi whilst on a holiday in Florence at the age of twelve, I thought I would be prepared for the Prado: I wasn’t  Gallery after gallery filled with the mastery of Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian et al, I was also introduced, for the very first time, to some of Spain’s own sons – Velazquez, Goya, Murillo and many more.

It was the most incredible place, and I could easily have spent the entire weekend just wandering its halls, but my travelling companions had other ideas and I was dragged, far too soon and dazed in the extreme, over to El Museo del Arte Thyssen-Bornemisza.

This very different collection was started in the 1920s by the German/Hungarian son of a German industrialist, Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kázon (1875–1947) and later expanded by his son Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza (1921–2002).

The second baron’s fifth and final wife was a former Miss España, Carmen ‘Tita’ Cervera, and it was she who persuaded him to negotiate with the Spanish government to move his collection to Madrid.

A very different experience from the Prado awaited, and initially not one that zinged any of my aesthetic sensors.

The ground floor was entirely devoted to what I would broadly term ‘Modern Art’. From canvas after canvas of little coloured squares and squiggles, we moved into another room only to find a floor to ceiling painting of a red rectangle on a larger green rectangle, and next to it another huge depiction of what we were told was a woman, but in reality looked rather more like the result of a playgroup finger painting frenzy. The next room was dominated by Warhol’s large tin of soup picked out in coloured dots and a childlike picture of a stick-bird.

As my colleagues raved and admired the very same artworks that were threatening to burn out my retina, I felt rather like a participant in an elaborate production of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Sycophant A: ‘The vermilion undertones of the work so clearly speak to me of the artist’s angst at society’s injustices.’

Sycophant B: ‘Quite so, quite so. Have you not also noticed the light cyan smears suspended in the top left hand corner? They speak of the artist’s latent hope for humanity.’

Sycophant C: ‘Oh most certainly, the work of a genius, no less. How well the artist has captured the essence of Self with those brash magenta lines.’

Harassed-looking woman: ‘Oh look Juanito, this is where we left your colouring pad. Excuse me, that actually belongs to my son.’ (Leaning forward she removes the object of the sycophants fawning and slips it into her toddler’s nappy bag where it belongs).

Sycophant A: ‘Oh, Um.’ (Busies herself looking at her nails, before sidling nervously away).

Sycophant B: ‘Ah, yes, um.’ (Coughs, looks around, waves at someone who doesn’t wave back, and bustles off).

Sycophant C: ‘Have you thought of getting that boy into art school? What talent! What deep understanding of the human condition! Señora! Señora! Please stop running! Where are you going?’

For the record I should really add that none of the above occurred anywhere other than in my sorry imagination, and no sycophants were injured in the writing of this chapter, although a pedant was born.

Thankfully the vista improved markedly with every staircase we climbed, and by the time we had seen the rest of the Thyssen collection (which in size is second only to that of Queen Elizabeth) my faith in the art world had been restored.

The last point of ‘El Triángulo de Oro’ is the Mueso Nacional Centro del Arte Reina Sofía (or El Reina Sofía as it is commonly known).

Inaugurated in 1992 and named after the current Spanish queen, the museum concentrates mainly on Spanish art from the mid to late 20^thcentury; and I am afraid to confess that I didn’t go. I went for a stroll and a coffee instead whilst the others overdosed on squiggles, cubes and blue periods.

I’ll admit it, I’m a philistine…